Highly engaged managers are what makes strategy execution possible. If you work on strategy you may think of highly engaged managers as a means to implement strategy efficiently. This is understandable. And here is the unexpected: having unclear strategy or poorly implementing it leads to disengagement of managers, regardless of whatever else you try.
The last engagement project which I worked on in a financial company, strongly supports the 2nd statement. We studied engagement and 65 factors that influence engagement. We divided managers into 3 groups: highly, moderately and nominally engaged, then we compared highly to nominally engaged managers.
The chart shows the key differences between highly and nominally engaged managers.
Out of 65 factors influencing engagement we identified the top 10 that separate highly engaged mangers from nominally engaged managers. It appeared that 5 of these top 10 factors driving a manager’s engagement were strictly connected to strategy. These were:
Understanding of benefits resulting from changes
Clear division of responsibility for changes
Practice of engaging managers in changes
Understanding of the role in the strategy
attitude towards strategic changes
Written by:
Andrzej Brzozowski, partner w firmie doradczej BENTEN
